So today in one of my classes the topic of GPAs and how they are weighted at certain colleges came up. My teacher said that at certain colleges, an A- is valued at a 3.7 rather than a 4.0, and a B+ is valued at a 3.3, B at 3.0, B- at 2.7 and so on. Anyone know what colleges do this?
I think that is pretty typical. Some value an A- as a 3.67, a B+ as a 3.33 and so forth which is close to the same thing. A few colleges don’t give plus/minus grades. You would have to look up each school’s grading protocol which can probably be found in the course catalog online. Colleges don’t weight grades like high schools do. Personally, I would not choose a college by how it calculates GPA because I think that it generally evens out over the course of four years.
Every college that does +/- grading will calculate GPA this way, with slight variations (e.g. A- = 3.67 and b+ = 3.33). There are some schools that don’t do +/- grading at all.AFAIK, there is not comprehensive list, so as @happy1 said, you’d need to look college by college, but over 4 years, it should all even out.
Also, the importance & use of GPAs is different- it’s mostly used in round numbers (or, you need a 3.5 to be eligible for something. You usually only see 1 decimal place, and there are way fewer people who care.
Not only do some colleges do +/- grading and some colleges don’t use +/- grading, but there are also some colleges that use - grading but not + grading (so instead of A, A-,B+,B,B-,etc. it would be A,A-,B,B-,etc.). So grading scale can really vary depending on the college you go to.
If you are worried about it, I suggest researching the grading scales of the colleges you are interested in. But I wouldn’t really worry about it too much. Unless you are planning on going to medical school or are in another situation where you have to meet a high gpa requirement, you are not expected to get a perfect or near perfect gpa in college (personally I think a 3.0+ gpa is good but that’s my opinion), and like happy1 said it should average out after 4 years so you should still get a gpa that represents your academic progress well.
The grading scale you described is actually the same grading scale used at the high school I went to (except extra weight for AP classes), so I was actually a bit surprised that you were concerned about it since to me it was no different than high school except you don’t get extra weight for taking certain classes. I guess just like colleges can have different grading scales high schools can have different grading scales too, and maybe with your high school’s grading scale changing to the grading scale you described would be a big change. One thing I don’t understand though is if a A- is a 4.0 on an unweighted 4.0 scale at your high school, what gpa would be an A (or were you talking about weighted gpa when you said “an A- is valued at a 3.7 rather than a 4.0”)?